Riding The NAFTA Superhighway: How Many Ameros For Your Wife, Mr. Paul?

You know that Rand Paul is having trouble getting the cow poop off of his tassel loafers when about the only endorsements he is getting these days are from Tea Partiers who note that he is the only high-profile candidate who has the guts to take on the NAFTA Superhighway.

Paul has been campaigning against the superhighway, which would connect Mexico, the U.S., and Canada and deal a fatal blow to American sovereignty, since at least 2008.

According to a 2007 article in The Nation, opponents fear that the superhighway "would slice through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts."

Whew!

But this would just be the start, because the superhighway is merely the first stage of a silent coup that would supplant the sovereign U.S. with a multinational North American Union and a single currency -- the Amero, which is another of Paul's black-helicopter bugaboos.

It's hard to say whether the superhighway or the Amero is more frightening, but not to worry. Neither exists or is being planned except as a fig newton of the imaginations of the paranoid burgers of Greater Wingnuttia, where Paul would win any and all elections by a landslide even if he was running against Jesus H. Christ.

It is tempting to dismiss these loonies out of hand, and at this point Paul seems more like the Kentucky Fried Candidate, as some wags are calling him, than someone to be taken seriously. But to not take him seriously is shortsighted. And dangerous.

Paul may not be the most astute politician, but beyond a small handful of pundits no one will care that he has now joined Louis Farrakhan and Prince Bandar as the only people to renege on appearances on Meet the Press, a show that I would watch with my mother to humor her because the panelists and guests spoke to her political ethos. Well, they sure don't speak to Tea Partiers and I myself am none the worse for wear for not having watched MTP since my mother's death a decade ago.

The lesson here is that a whole lot of perfectly sane people are extraordinarily pissed off at Washington and government in general and just because Paul leavens his libertarian loaf with paranoid delusions is no reason for them to not throw in their lot with him.